represents material rights," she begins, threading her way hesitantly through her thoughts. "It can't go beyond. If we don't recognize an inner law. . . the obliga- tion that love creates. . . being loved as well as loving. . . there is nothing to pre- vent our spreading ruin unhindered. . . . h """ IS t ere!' E dmund Wilson observed, rather testily, just a few years after Whar- ton's death, that "there are no first-rate men" in her novels. No heroes: no Mr. Darcy; no Mr. Rochester, no Will Ladis- law or Tom Outland, no one even to offer a hand and help the lady out. In "The House of Mirth," Lily Bart is badly damaged by the man who, in the work of another novelist, might have carried her away. Lawrence Selden, Lily's companion, offers her the regard of a connoisseur admiring an exquisite bit of animated porcelain, a regard that he nevertheless encourages her to con- fuse with love. It is Selden's peculiar function to draw out Lily's feelings and to continually subvert her marital plans, while refusing to make any claim on her himse1t Instead, he presents her with sublime, if hypocritical, ideals-indif- ference to money, to society-which serve only to mock the realities that she confronts. ("Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me," Lily cries, "if you have nothing to give me instead?") Whether Selden is cruel or a coward or simply unable to love the heroine as she might wish-or, perhaps, as he might wish-is left to the reader to decide. Wharton herself vacil- lates; as much as Lily and Selden, she seems entirely uncertain about what this character intends by his soul-shattering advances and retreats. There are several versions of this "negative hero," as Wharton referred to Selden, in her early stories, in which he may be said to form an equally sorry counterpart to the marital corpse. The muse of "The Muse's Tragedy" seeks to forgive the poet: "he had never made love to me; it was no fault of his if I wanted more than he could give me." In "The Touchstone," published in 1900, a great woman novelist also suffers the pain that such a negative lover in- flicts: "the physical reluctance" -on his part-"had, inexplicably; so overborne the intellectual attraction, that the last 70 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 2, 2001 years had been, to both of them, an agony of conflicting impllises " When Wharton attempts the man's point of view-as late as 1912, in "The Long Run"-there is no further enlighten- ment: all he recalls of fleeing an ideal ro- mance at its sexual threshold is panic, numbness, and loss. Of course, this lack of comprehension must be qualified: this is all that Wharton allows him to re- call; the confusion remains very much her own. What is this man afraid of? What is it that he-or Wharton-cannot express? I t is odd that critics and biographers, who have made so much of Wharton's dependence on James, have failed to fix on the crucial similarity between her "negative hero" and the emotionally deadlocked, sexually barricaded heroes of the Master-heroes whose homo- sexual desires, like James's, were con- cealed within a jungle of verbal cir- cumlocution. Wharton had no such ver- bal screens in her stylistic repertoire, bu t the logical inconsistencies and emotional riddles of "The House of Mirth"-and of several early stories- become equally understandable if seen in the light of the unadmitted homosex- uality of Wharton's leading man. Diana Trilling, writing forty years ago, in a social climate that accepted James as celibate for the sake of his art-rather than, as he is seen today; sexually sup- pressed for the sake of his culture- viewed Lawrence Selden as a portrait of J ames himse in all his moral elevation and aesthetic pie This cannot be ac- curate: the type occurs in Wharton's stories well before she became a friend of James's, in 1904. Yet there is a larger accuracy in the notion that Wharton was caught up with a Jamesian hero in the flesh. Wharton's friend and first biogra- pher, Percy Lubbock, identified "the dry and narrow and supercilious" Walter Berry (himself a friend of James's and of Proust's) as the invariable mode] for Wharton's misbegotten hero Berry was the first man Wharton loved: in 1883, she had waited in vain for him to propose; instead, he'd fled without a word, and kept away for fourteen years. By the time he returned, she was long married, he was a "confirmed bachelor," and their friendship resumed the overtones, if not the substance, of romance. She considered him her best literary adviser, but whatever comments he may have made about his baleful ap- pearance in her work went up in smoke; Wharton burned all but the most in- nocuous of their letters. (The hero- ine of "The Muse's Tragedy," publish- ing her letters from the poet, fills them with phony ellipses to suggest intima- cies that never existed; one cannot help but wonder if Wharton burned Berry's letters for what they didn't say.) On Berry's death, in 1927, Wharton re- quested that his ashes be scattered over the garden of her home in France. His funeral wreaths, however, were placed by his close and loving cousin on the grave of Oscar Wilde. Wharton did not burn her so-called "love diary"-a little volume begun in 1907, filled with dizzyingly joyous and tortured entries addressed to an anony- mous man-but left it among her pa- pers, clearly marked: "The Life Apart." Because Wharton had written exten- sively and adoringly of Berry in her memoirs, several scholars assumed, after the diary's discovery, that he was the lover who once had torn her life apart. It is even possible that Wharton in- tended the misidentification, as a sort of posthumous bibliographic consumma- tion. But the distinction of breaking the pattern of sexual thwartedness and giv- ing Wharton her first experience of a "posi tive hero" actually belonged to a man she did not mention at all. W harton tried to get Morton Full- erton to return her letters, but he had, apparently; too much pride and too much of a sense of history (and per- haps its dollar value) to do it; more than three hundred of them can now be read in university collections. He also pre- served the private, often frankly sexual poems that she wrote for him, carefully copying them out and annotating the date and sometimes the occasion before